Seven minutes past three again

Here's a scene from some months later. It's an example of how things might go, and I'm not promising it.

You wake in the dark. You don't know what time it is, because the clock faces the wall and your phone is on the landing. The house is quiet. For a few seconds your mind is blank and comfortable.

Then the boiler arrives. It's been making a noise, and a new one would cost thousands. You notice the familiar lurch in your stomach, and notice too that your mind has already started listing what you could sell.

"Three o'clock mind," you say to yourself. "It's on the list. The engineer's coming on Tuesday."

Both of those are true. At ten past seven yesterday evening, at the kitchen table, you wrote "Boiler noise" on the left of the page and "Engineer booked Tues 9 to 1, wait for his verdict" on the right. Until Tuesday there's nothing to think about. Your mind makes one more attempt. It asks what happens if the engineer says the boiler's finished. You give the same answer in the same words.

Something else surfaces that wasn't on the list. It's your niece's birthday on Saturday and you haven't bought a card. You reach out, write "Ellie card" on the pad without opening your eyes properly, and put the pencil down.

Then you go to your grandmother's house. You go in through the back door, as you always did. There's the mat, and the row of wellingtons. The kitchen table has the oilcloth on it, and the tin with the picture of a coach and horses on the lid is on the dresser. You've got as far as the dresser drawers when you notice you've drifted back to the boiler. You return to the drawers. In the second one there were always rubber bands and a ball of string.

You don't remember the hall.

In the morning you're a little tired. It wasn't a perfect night, and you think you were probably awake for half an hour. You see "Ellie card" on the pad and buy one at lunchtime. On Tuesday the engineer replaces a valve for eighty-five pounds and says the boiler's got years in it. That figure is part of the example, and I can't promise you a kind engineer.

Things won't always be this tidy. Some nights the problems will be bigger than a boiler, and the house won't hold. You'll get up and sit in the other room with a dull book and feel hard done by. There'll be weeks when the old shift comes back. But you've stopped handing your hardest questions to yourself at the hour when you're least fit to answer them. The problems get their ten minutes in the evening and their hour in the day, with a pen and a phone to hand. At night you let yourself rest.

If you do one thing after closing this book, do the first handover this evening. It's ten minutes at a table with a line down the middle of the page. Then turn the clock to the wall, and put a pad and a pencil by the bed.